Tag Archives: Victoria Clark

All I Did Was Shoot My Man: A Leonid McGill Mystery by Walter Mosley (Riverhead Hardcover, $26.95, 336 pages)

“And the only sound that’s left/ After the ambulances go/ Is Cinderella sweeping up/ On Desolation Row.” Bob Dylan

All I Did Was Shoot My Man is the fourth in a series of Leonid McGill mysteries by Walter Mosley. This time an abrupt ending creeps up out of nowhere and doesn’t quite seem to relate to the closure of the rest of the plot – there are likely plans in place for a fifth book.

McGill introduces characters and events in a unique way that sometimes works and sometimes is frustrating. Often plot twists are dropped on the reader as if they should know what’s going on, but these elements do not always come together or make total sense for a couple of pages or chapters. Perhaps this may sometimes keep the reader’s interest level high, but it backfires at other times.

In this story, Zella Grisham murders her boyfriend for cheating on her, and McGill, a private investigator, allows himself to get pulled into proving her innocent of a crime for which she is falsely accused. The proof involves a massive amount of money and a large international company.

The real perpetrators of the crime eventually come after McGill, threatening him and his family until McGill – who seems to have a love-hate relationship with just about every character in the book – manages to connect the dots.

McGill’s family is another story altogether. Mosley uses the family by attempting to create some sense of normalcy within the chaos. The characters have a rather bizarre definition of family, but they are one. There are kids from multiple parties and partners, both married and otherwise, that form relationships built on varying combinations of love, convenience, and desperation.

Fortunately, the characters created by Mosley are interesting. It is this fact that there are relationships and personalities, rather than just action and events, that makes this a better book than most of its kind.

Recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by the publisher. “If you like your crime snappy, hard-boiled and razor-edged, Walter Mosley is for you.” Victoria Clark

Dave Moyer is an educator, and the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel.